URLs du Jour

2022-07-11

[Exercise in Cluelessness]

  • If you can't kill 'em, erase them from the Internet. Kevin D. Williamson looks at America on Parole.

    If Democrats get their way, America’s crisis-pregnancy centers will be wiped off the map — literally.

    A small army of progressive activists and Democratic officials including New York attorney general Letitia James is leaning on Google to ensure that its mapping service does not direct women experiencing crisis pregnancies to crisis-pregnancy centers — to ensure that these women are directed to abortion clinics and to abortion clinics only. As Jezebel complains: “Nearly 40 percent of search results for ‘abortion’ on Google Maps direct people in abortion-hostile states to crisis pregnancy centers instead of real clinics.”

    Why bother with persuasion when anybody who disagrees with you can just be digitally disappeared?

    The progressives’ delegitimization game is old, familiar, and tedious: Forcing children to parrot ideological bromides as an educational requirement is not indoctrination but “cultural competence”; climate policy is not a matter of political, social, and economic tradeoffs but a question that can be answered empirically via science, and, hence, opposition to the progressive climate-policy agenda is anti-science; criticizing that climate agenda is not political activism but somehow is securities fraud; talking to unhappy people experiencing gender dysphoria is forbidden “conversion therapy” that stands criminally in the way of the obvious medical necessity of ritual mutilation and genital amputation. Etc.

    Many on the left have let their argumentation skills atrophy, preferring instead to insist that disagreement with their views is akin to maintaining the earth is flat. (My favorite example from last year.)

    And then there's…


  • Worry not, GOSPLAN is here, comrade. The WSJ editorialists are not fans of Pete Buttigieg’s Climate Toll Road.

    To adapt what Stalin said of the Pope, how many divisions does the Supreme Court have? That seems to be the implicit slogan of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who on Thursday ignored the High Court’s recent ruling with a proposed rule requiring states to reduce CO2 emissions on highways—that is, banish gas-powered vehicles.

    In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court ruled that regulatory agencies can’t impose costly new regulations without a clear direction from Congress. The feds had interpreted an obscure corner of the Clean Air Act to impose costly climate rules on power plants.

    Now the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wants to take this abuse of authority on the road. It cites an obscure provision in federal law that authorizes it to set national “performance” goals for the national highway system. The law defines these goals as safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction, system reliability, freight movement and economic vitality, environmental sustainability and reduced project delivery delays.

    One of the fun parts of imagining GOP control of Congress: they could zero out the entire budget of the Department of Transportation.


  • Michael Moore channels Carrie Nation. His proposed 28th Amendment is all about guns. And refreshingly totalitarian. It repeals the Second Amendment. Sample (from Section 5):

    Congress will stipulate and continually update the limited list of approved firearms for civilian use, including weapons in the future that are not yet invented. The following firearms are heretofore banned:

    • All automatic and semi-automatic weapons and all devices which can enable a single-shot gun to fire automatically or semi-automatically;

    • Any weapon that can hold more than six bullets or rounds at a time or any magazine that holds more than six bullets;

    • All guns made of plastic or any homemade equipment and machinery or a 3D printer that can make a gun or weapon that can take a human life.

    Yes, 3D printers too. It's like Moore was asleep when they discussed the Eighteenth Amendment in his history class.


  • Feelgood story of the day. Axios reports that Wired’s union threatens to strike.

    The union representing roughly 65 editorial workers at Wired, the tech publisher owned by Condé Nast, is threatening to strike for two days if it can’t reach a contract agreement with Condé Nast management by July 12 — the first of two digital shopping holidays known collectively as “Amazon Prime Days.”

    That's tomorrow! Eek!

    WIRED (the mag prefers all-caps spelling) is consistently Progressive and Woke. Today's example headline: The Climate Anxiety Discussion Has a Whiteness Problem. Note: not the "climate discussion", but the "climate anxiety discussion". Which is a separate thing. Imagine: decades-long screeching about We'reAllGonnaDieeee has caused some psychological problems in the audience.

    Discuss.

    But anyway, I assume WIRED's other notable "journalism" is inserting commercial plugs for stuff. Like $1049 electric scooters and $679 inflatable paddle boards. I assume that's a cash cow for the magazine, and the joyless drones who pump out those articles would like a bigger cut. So maybe they could actually afford to buy some of that stuff.


Last Modified 2024-01-30 8:15 AM EDT